plant your own garden

Part One: Inception to Fully Formed WIP

crossfire started with a small idea while I was watching Daiya the first time. A one shot, I thought, optimistically. Cute. Fluffy. Then, I, uh, accidentally fell in love with Miyuki, a character with far, far too many background story holes, and that way, my friends, lies death.

Because, a ship might get me? But I have plenty of ships I like that I never end up writing. It’s the character with the complex thoughts that brings me to the table to feast. It’s a character that brings me to longfic.

In a fic I wrote called to be first, to be best, I wrote about childhood best friends who have been in love for a while, but only one of them, the non-POV character, knows it. This is not a revolutionary plot. The fun of writing that fic was in the details; combing through things in canon and extrapolating the future, playing with dialogue choices, and stretching a dynamic I already felt ideal by introducing a new element that forces them to take a step over or a step back away from the line of "more than friends" they’d been tiptoeing for so long. Even including flashbacks and heavy introspection, as well as worldbuilding, that fic is under 25k. That’s short for me and my writing style, but if I could rewrite that fic now, I wouldn’t change a thing, and it felt exactly the right length to explore that dynamic for me.

But then I fell for Oikawa, and that dynamic took on new, exciting possibilities. After The Fall, I wrote a ‘ten-years-later’ fic where I had to crush them to rebuild them, and that, a deeply introspective character piece, more than doubled in plot-length, ending up around 70k.

The key, for me, is this: for a character-driven introspection piece, you need more elements than a single progressing plot. You need side-plots. You need a larger cast. You need detailed and thorough understanding of how your character would react in any given situation, and you need to show some of them, so that the audience/reader believes you when you tell them the character would react that way. It’s a lot of showing, and I usually break it down thusly: an external impetus, or something that creates a sense of wrongness and puts a spanner in the works. (I have another fic in mind/ in the planning stages for a different Oikawa ship, and it’s going to be LONG, and the key to the length is that I’ve broken something about them, and now I have to fix it. The process of fixing— the fallout, the resentment, the repair, the resolution and the aftermath… that’s what takes up most of the real estate in that particular fic, not the bits that assert character compatibility and all that jazz because it’s obvious they’re compatible, even if it’s not your ship.)

ANYWAY, in Daiya, to me, Miyuki is fascinating, and certain dynamics needed to be there to allow me to showcase the facets of his personality I find most intriguing.

And this tiny kernal of desire for a character examination initially blossomed into the previously mentioned probably one-shot. I’d jotted down an idea for a typical university au, grounded in canon, with a 30k plot that would result in a romance, and a Miyuki who was just as closed off, but more ready to let someone in. I had things I wanted to include that were important to me: Miyuki’s admiration for Chris, his surprisingly tight friendship with Kuramochi, and his deep affection for Furuya. Sawamura’s ability to change moods quickly and ability to forgive people their missteps, and trust over and over again. Sawamura’s huge love for Chris, and the importance of learning how to be his best in the scheme of his priorities. How Kuramochi looks after Miyuki emotionally in a way few others bother. (Kuramochi and Miyuki, by the way, are more along the lines of one of my ideal dynamics, which I call the 'bickering asshole besties dynamic' in my head. Every plot I come up with for them is long and involved, haha.)

But the more I thought about it, the longer the idea became: If I wanted to show Miyuki opening up, I should explore his reasons for closing off in the first place. If I wanted to portray ways Miyuki could learn to be good to people without sacrificing his dedication to baseball above all else, I had to do it in a context where he had a lot to lose, baseball wise. If I wanted the decision to emotionally connect with people to be a tough one, I had to raise the sociocultural stakes, and make sure his other friendships grew proportionally with his romantic attachment.

And so on and so forth, until my whole life was in shambles, and I realized there was No Possible Way this would be 30k, and as fucking usual, I’d been fooling myself.

Then came Evernote. Evernote is basically my whole life in an app. I use it for jotting down plot points, taking notes from readings, research ideas with regards to my dissertation… academia, writing, grocery lists, it doesn’t matter, it’s in Evernote. When a bored anthropologist a hundred years from now tries to reconstruct life in the 2010s for an internet-addicted Millennial, my Evernote will be the Primary Source of Their Dreams, especially if they are extremely interested in which episodes of Meitantei Conan are relevant to the Black Org plot-line or the how much I spent at the sale on brie in bulk at Tesco on December 7th 2015.

ANYWAY, in Evernote I sketched out the first draft of what I like to call my Big Elements.

The Big Elements, as I use them, are:

• Exposition: introducing the characters and setting briefly to ground you in your when/where/who. I always use this space to establish voice, also, as I’m a strict writer of limited 3rd point-of-view.

• Kapow:  this is often referred to in the freytag pyramid as the inciting incident, but I usually call it KAPOW cause that’s what it is. Basically this is the thing that takes the rock at the top of the hill, and, like a jerk, pushes it so that it starts hurtling down toward imminent disaster, aka the conflict.

• Conflict: there are 4 types of conflict, but I only write about three. 1.) Character vs character (PVP for all u game nerds), 2.) character vs their society, and 3.) character vs themself. Number 3 is my personal favorite, to be quite honest. This, the conflict, is broken into three parts so I’mma just…

• ⁃ Rising action: increase the tension
• ⁃ Climax: point in the story of highest tension. I have one of these for each plot thread, and stagger them reasonably in the same arc of the story. It’s terrible for pacing to have a bunch of climaxes spread out— having all the climax events happen reasonably close together drives my POV character to desperation, which is exactly where I like them, mwhahaha. 
• ⁃Falling action: the events of the climax(es) start to get resolved, untangled, and change the world of the protagonist.

• Resolution: all the fallout is mostly over, and things fall into place or don’t, but either way the character has experiences catharsis. If the fic is an essay, this is your conclusion, where you sum up how far your characters have come, and also reveal how far they have left to go.

•Aftermath: this is often the "epilogue"-y stuff, the one year later, the outtake scene you’re dying to write about your post-catharsis character.

For crossfire, my Big Elements looked like this after a couple weeks of being angry that I was even going to write it out:

 

It’s sloppy, messy, and just a brief skeleton of what actually happens in the fic, and I did later end up overhauling this whole thing, so this is not what that looks like now, but this is where I started. I ended up throwing out some of these elements and incorporating new ones, that emphasized friendships and human connections. Actually, this plot summary is a bit embarrassing because it’s so rudimentary, but I’m showing you anyway because EVERYONE starts somewhere. For me, I don’t bother with spelling or sentence structure or any of that at this point in the process, because that guide? It’s just for me to think about. Sometimes I write these in not-English, even, haha. I do keep them, though, and edit them as I discover new things about my plot.

Side note on the basics of Evernote: You divide things into notebooks. This notebook is my "misc anime fics" notebook, and here you can see fics I haven’t started on, fics I’ve finished, and notes and stuff I’ve attached to certain fics. Evernote is the first organizational tool I use when thinking about fics, and it shows with the huge number of things I keep in there! The sidebar is customizable, as is what shows at the top, and most importantly, it syncs to my ipad and phone.

All right, back on topic.

So now I know this is going to be a longfic. There’s no way this much can happen for me, with my writing style, in the previously assumed 30k.

So it’s going to now have Plot Threads.

Plot Threads are just general stuff I need to make run throughout the story, and I often have quite a few of them. This is the true reason my stories have such significant length— I try to incorporate these threads deeply and organically, and sometimes that’s more successful than other times. 

Generally, though, I think my plot threads and their associated themes are the most effective and affective part of my storytelling. I often tell people that I am not a good writer, when it comes to prose. I am a satisfactory writer, technically: I write well enough to get my point across. What I’ve always thought I do particularly well is storytelling, especially the bits with worldbuilding and characterization. Knowing that, I invest a lot of my time into making sure that these parts of my fics and my original fiction works are as strong as they can be, and I find betas to help me polish that technical stuff I’m balls at. (I have been informed that I’m not actually balls at it, but some days it very much feels that way.)

Okay, so plot threads: This fic had five, named A through E.

A quick snapshot of how I write them up:

 

This isn’t all of them, nor is this my final version, but this is the general level of detail I include.

(Clarification: The Big Elements and the Plot Threads are terminology I use because it makes sense to me. Other people do similar stuff and have similar names for it, of course, but I use what comes most naturally to me. I use Plot Threads as a descriptor of the stuff that is stitching the plot, the Big Elements, together. I could also use plot glue, but it lacks the imagery of "threading", which I like very much. So plot threads stitch together plot elements into arcs.)

Alright. So we have a Big Elements and a handy-dandy guide to the Plot Threads I’m interested in. Now what?

Music.

Music is so integral to my writing process that I am actually incapable of writing without it. It’s impossible. I often have just one song I listen to for like 6 months whenever I’m working on that fic, but this time, I have a playlist. I’ve uploaded a part of it to 8tracks here.

What I feel is really the 'key track' for this fic, the one that covers the most moods, is good old Johnny Cash, but to be honest, that might just be what I’m feeling right now. Another fierce candidate is the Oh Wonder song Technicolor Beat. I’m always interested in what playlists other people would make for my fic more than I am in sharing my own. Music is so personal. Regardless, I separate "writing time" from "play time" with music: I train myself that when I hear a certain set of songs, I must write on a particular fic. As a result, I can’t listen to those songs when it’s NOT time to write. So there are work songs and play songs. It’s a way of separating and organizing my time. I also do this with schoolwork. Some people accomplish the same thing with location. For example, going to the library or a coffee shop is for writing/studying, while at home in bed is for playing/watching Netflix/etc. Music is preferable for me because I need to be able to write anywhere or nothing will ever get done. Tragic but true.

When that’s sorted, then it’s time to make it a Project.

I used to do this part of my writing in Evernote, too. I’d make a separate notebook for the fic, and then make each "arc" a document. This worked well for me, to an extent, because I could write on my phone. I use public transportation a lot, and being able to write on my phone and ipad is how anything gets done.

Butttttt, as you may or may not know, I’m a linguist. I study rare and endangered languages, and I do a lot of morphosyntax stuff— meaning writing up dissertations and papers in a word processor like Evernote or MS Word would be a total nightmare. I needed a word processor with a lot of the functionalities of office, and the organizational capacity of Evernote, that could also import and read LaTex files. What I found was Scrivener. My friend hyperlydian has been using Scrivener for years, but it always seemed like too much fuss for me. I mean, I write fic on my phone, in plaintext; what did I need with a 30 quid/45 dollar software that did all this STUFF? With my dissertation growing, I finally had an excuse to buy it, and now I’m a total convert.

So now making a Project means opening a new binder in Scrivener. I don’t use one of the templates provided at all. I just make my own. Scrivener is a software with a million posts dedicated to using it and all that jazz, so I’m not going to go in-depth, but here’s what a project looks like for me:

 

So… admission time. I’m the world’s shittiest outliner. This doesn’t have much to do with my ability to plan detail, which I think is pretty good, actually, but I cannot outline a fic before I write it. This Big Elements thing and my 'plot threads’? That’s the max amount of "pre-writing" I can do and still have any motivation to write the story, except for my timelines (which I’ll get to in a moment.)

This is outline mode in Scrivener. It turns what I’ve already written into an outline for me to peruse, so I can refresh my memory on what scenes I’ve written. The information underneath is a brief synopsis of the scene. It can also be displayed on an index card in corkboard view, but this is better for me. Each scene has letters after it. Remember those Plot Threads? Every time one is incorporated and touched on in a scene, either thematically or outright, I put that letter in the scene title. This helps me make sure that threads don’t get ignored for too long, and that I’m dispersing my exposition cleanly. Scene length should vary, too— I try to avoid having really long scenes next to each other, the same way I try to avoid having really long sentences next to each other. This is how I control pacing.

This outline, unlike what other people usually refer to when they talk about outlining, gets generated as I write. I don’t preplan exact scenes more than 2-4 ahead of where I currently am, and even then, I only plan it if something very specific has to happen and I’m concerned about remembering precise details with regards to pacing. Though I always plan my story arcs, which I guess I sometimes call chapters, sometimes parts, that’s a very general thematic outline. I know what generally needs to happen, but not how.

Writing ahead makes discovering where a story is going significantly less exciting for me. I want to unearth character motivations as I go along, and find imagery and detail organically. This is what works for me. I have multiple writer-type friends who obsess over outlines and pre-writing, and they’re amazing writers who produce interesting, wonderful things. I just can’t write like they do, it makes me want to lie down and cry, and I’m sure they’d be tearing out their hair if they had to write like me so I completely get it, haha.

In the binder, I’ve now copied my plot guide and my plot threads into the beginning stuff, and made folders or documents for characters and places and facts. BUT, I don’t fill them out before I start. I fill that out as I go along, adding things that I "discover" about the characters in order to keep my characterization consistent. I also attach any wikis I need underneath those documents, for things like birthdays or quotes or specific page numbers for events. When I wrote my Detective Conan fic, I would actually keep records of episode and minutes during the episodes that specific things happened, in order to be able to quickly re-reference them for mood. This project required slightly less diligence because the canon is so much smaller. Still, better safe than sorry with canon-matching when you’re writing a canon fic.

I also start collecting images at this point. There’s an online app I adore, called Padlet. It’s basically an online collaging board, with pretty nifty link-collecting and photo-collating capabilities. With some fic projects, I also make a padlet. I didn’t need one for this fic, because my setting details were mostly not location imagery this time, but I’ll show you a padlet for another fic I wrote, in the territory of the dragon king: 

 

This is stuff like food prep videos, very specific sitting habits, and LOCATION. Every place I describe has to match with the reality, and to do that, I create copious amounts of references. This gives me a lot of resources. Usually I don’t write about places I haven’t been. I have done so once, and I consulted with someone living there pretty regularly for detail checks because a mistake like that can throw a reader right out of the story.

A side note: Scrivener can be used to do this if you don’t need the collage-y aspects. Scrivener’s creator, LatteandLiterature, also have another application called Scapple that does this, as well, but it’s not free, and it’s got a LOT of functionality I don’t need. If I ever have some non-writing excuse to by this software I might try it out for writing.

So now, a million years later, I get to writing.

Before I get to the excruciating task of describing the hellish wasteland that is hitting wordcount goals, I should mention something else. Earlier I talked about my timelines, and promised to go into that later. Now is a good time, since a useful timeline for the way I write should be started at the beginning of the fic, and kept up to date with every scene. I don’t outline. I don’t plan scene by scene at all. Thus, it’s extremely important for me to have roadmaps of where I’ve been and when I went there in order to keep the passage of time consistent in the story. Since I’ve said very clearly that this story takes begins in 2015, I now have to adhere to actual dates. November 17th, Miyuki’s birthday, was on a Tuesday in 2015.

Back when I was in high school, I used to use post-its and a calendar to make timelines on the wall of my bedroom for my history projects and such. It’s been a little while since then, and new tools surface every day to make my life easier. One of those tools is Aeon Timeline.

Aeon Timeline is fully sync-able with Scrivener, but I usually keep them in separate windows and don’t hyper-link the scene to the event, because it’s just not useful for me with the way I timeline. Something you can do with Aeon, though, is make it so clicking on an event will open up the scene connected to it! Which is super awesome when I’m doing Literature Reviews for journal articles, but is useless to me for fic.

As I write scenes, I add the times and dates along with anecdotes to my running timeline. Then, if I need to reference how long ago something happened in-fic, I can just pop over to the timeline and let it calculate it for me. You can even keep track of the time of day if you’re writing one super-complex afternoon, so that all your events stay in chronological order.

Here’s a bit of the timeline for Part One and Part Two of crossfire in Aeon:

 

You can see I’ve separated events into categories. These are called Arcs in Aeon… I’ve got general events, stuff that’s about baseball, and then stuff about his dad’s campaign, all set neatly out. Another feature, if you have a fic with multiple POVs, is the 'relationship mode', where you can also assign a character to an event, which is AWESOME.

I also color code the events for quick browsing. Purple things are Key Events, where perspectives about something shift, or a plot twist occurs. Blue is for won games, and ochre is for lost games, just in case I’m browsing quickly and not reading in detail. I add events as I write them. This keeps my dating consistent. 

Part Two: Cranking Out Words

This part of my process is the most messy. This happens in a myriad of ways, and involves a lot of other people.

I am perfectly capable of sitting down on my own and writing. The first draft of raise your expectations was written almost entirely on buses going back and forth from my campus to my home, in snatches of 40 minutes. Writing is something I do out of basically sheer determination, because I am never particularly in the mood to write. Often, I’m not sure I like writing as much as I need to write— days without writing, even when I’m sick or busy or uninspired and thus have an excuse to not write, result in headaches, cluttered thoughts. I’ve always had an addictive personality. Very rarely can I just like this, or just do it. I can’t like an anime; I love it, I obsess over it. Same with books or games. Do NOT get me started on how terrible an idea it was to purchase the Sims, which is a game that doesn’t END. Anyway, I often don’t want to write, because I’m a slow typist, because I’m lazy, because I’ve been translating ancient languages for 14 hours, etc. But then I do it anyway. It’s not because I feel some kind of responsibility to write. Well, save for my actual research and such. It’s generally that if I don’t write, it’s the same as skipping the gym for me, and it ruins my general level of mood satisfaction.

And okay, I’ll admit it: I’m a misery-writer. I don’t enjoy the PROCESS of writing all that much. I enjoy having written, but I don’t get a deep thrill out of the act. I’m a two finger typist, for one thing, and for another, I have incredible accessibility problems with reading long things— I suffer from chronic migraines, and often can’t see words on a screen. Writing for me is an act of pain, not pleasure. At the same time, I love telling stories. I think if I weren’t a writer, I’d be lost. My biggest outlet is sitting down and producing stories. So sometimes the words pour out, and sometimes I grind them out, but they ALWAYS come out eventually.

I know people for whom writing is an act of pleasure, and people who have to eke out every word. I don’t have advice for that. But I can tell you some different methods I have for cranking out words.

My main tools for writing alone are Evernote, previously mentioned, and Scrivener, which I’ve also brought up previously. Other than that, I often use Dragon Dictation, meaning I ramble thoughts aloud and then dictation turns them into words for me to edit later. I do that while I’m cooking.

HOWEVER, I have discovered writing is a lot more fun if you can rope people into doing it with you, in word sprints and in word wars. Mywriteclub is great for this. It allows real time collaboration and improved organization of word sprints and I freakin love it.

I edit as I write. I edit a lot. I have extensive labels on each scene that indicate what level of editing I’m on: 

 

Colors indicate different scene statuses. For example, a blue scene has been looked over by both my regular betas, whereas a pink scene has been written completely but unseen by anyone or even proofread by me. Yellow scenes are ideas, half-sketched scenes, written tidbits where I want to remember the exact wording but I’m not ready to produce the whole scene. This makes editing easy— I know what scenes need the most love, haha.

Another thing I’ve been getting into is voice notes. I talk out the whole scene while I’m cooking or showering, then type it up later, with quick, easy notes.

General writing notes for me:

I write all my dialogue first, and then fill in the prose. That gives me a lot of room to play around with the execution of the prose, and allows for me to really focus in on details. I LOVE setting details especially, or people who can’t stop messing with their clothes, tugging at collars, playing with their water glass, etc.

I generally think of every scene as a miniature fic. That means it has a beginning, middle, and end, and it advanced a least one subplot, but preferably two, as well as highlighted a character trait that needs highlighting in someone. I like for every scene I write to fulfill multiple purposes, and have the same structure as a complete fic UNLESS I’m attempting to jar the reader, or to specifically accomplish a “cliffhanger” feel.

I love separating character voices with diction choices. I love knowing a character “wouldn’t use that word” or “likes these kinds of swears.” I love best friends who are rude af to each other, and I love insults becoming pet names. I love all of that, and it’s all down to knowing my voices and all jazz.

I have a seriously transparent love of certain body parts, and I edit out half of them but it’s still really transparent.

Part 3: The Post Draft Beta

The best thing I ever learned about beta-work is that everyone has their own strengths.

This has lead me, ultimately, to having a team of beta instead of a single beta, and my editing has improved exponentially.

The separation is like this: I have a characterization beta, a narrative flow beta, and a SPAG (spelling and grammar) beta.

The first person who sees the draft is usually my narrative flow beta. They tell me “this scene is too short” or “i hate this transition and also cut 6000 words and rewrite this horrible scene while you’re at it” or “how could this happen im angry im mad more dogs”, and then I fix those things before I send it off to the next beta, who is my…

Characterization beta. She checks for things like “this is OOC based on how you characterized them back in chapter two,” or “i really love how you brought forward this memory here, it really explains why character X is mad at character Y.” I go through, I revise, I change dialogue, I edit prose.

Then it goes BACK to the first beta, my narrative beta. The first beta tells me to cut things again, and I figuratively cry, and then I do it.

Next, I run the whole thing through hemmingway, and attempt to get rid of redundancies.

Finally, it goes to my SPAG beta. My SPAG beta deserves to be knighted. I can’t spell. My grasp on grammar is tentative at best. And worst of all, I write in a mix of British and American English, and there is no rhyme or rhythm to my madness. Whatever happens happens. My SPAG beta is a Brit, but since I prefer to publish fics in American English, she scrubs them down of Briticisms, does intense line edits, corrects every dubious grammatical choice. On fics that are 100k+. Sometimes in one night when I have a deadline. It’s hours of work, and I could not do this without her.

Writing fics is something I couldn’t do without my beta team at all. Editing is just as important a process for me as writing, and I wouldn’t have the skills to produce things this polished without the help of people who have the skills I lack. 

Part 4: Miscellania

In summary, writing fic for me is a big ole headache but also a rewarding large product that allows me to grow as a storyteller. I’ve included a list below if all the stuff I mentioned in this mini-essay:

Free or Partially Free With Limitations:

Evernote 
8tracks 
Padlet 
Mywriteclub 
Hemmingway 

Paid:

Scrivener, Scapple, Aeon Timeline

And longtime followers of this blog probably know about this, but I maintain a list of internet-based writing tools in this list on my listography! 

I hope any of it ends up being useful or fun for someone!